1-star reviews of 'Extreme Programming' - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Programming-Explained-Embrace-Change/product-reviews/0201616416/ref=cm_cr_pr_top_recent?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending <comment><USER3> In the late 90s, I worked in two different Lisp companies (one of which went on to become quite successful). They were, in many ways, far more modern than the average C++ shop of the era: They accepted that programming could be exploratory, that unit tests were a great thing, and that you wouldn't know what you wanted until after you'd already built half of it.

And yet…

I remember programmers who disappeared for months at a time to work on "their" modules. Integration phases where we tried to combine wildly incompatible components after 6 months of separate work. The breathless joy of seeing an actual regression test suite for the first time. The endless arguments trying to find the ideal design. And we all thought this was the "right way" to develop software!

I remember Beck's _Extreme Programming_. For me, it came as a bolt from the sky, obviously radical and brilliant. It turned me from a clueless junior programmer into somebody who took over and turned around a 150,000 line, 14-year-old C++ project, a project which everybody thought had succumbed to terminal bit rot.

Unit tests. Short iterations. The planning game, a.k.a., "Here, let me take your list of features, and tell you what each one costs. Now you decide what order we build them in." Man, does it bring back memories.

Of course, that was pretty much the shining high point. Within just a few years, Beck's idiosyncratic personal vision had been replaced by the "agile manifesto", and then by an entire consulting industry. Good riddance to all that.

But you know, it's been a long time since I heard somebody say "integration phase" or "object-oriented analysis." And I couldn't be happier.

<comment><USER4> I had a similar epiphany when I read Beck's book around 2000 or so. I don't think the Agile community has added much if anything to the work Beck originally laid out, either. In fact the term "Scrummerfall" is now in common usage here in Minneapolis.

<comment><USER5> Well, that was somewhat predictable. You've got a lot of managers. Some of them don't like to code, and regardless, all of them certainly need to be employed. What would they do if their shop started doing XP? One or two can become PMs or coaches, but what happens if you have much more managers?

At the risk of sounding somewhat loony, I think Marx said something about the middle class (in his definition: the class between the proletariat engaging in production, and the ruling class of capitalists) trying to preserve the benefits it gets from its social role. Can't find a citation though.

<comment><USER6> It's funny that there is a quote, recently made famous by Civ 4, stating "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the expanding needs of the bureaucracy," while management would be a much better fit than bureaucracy IMO.

Also, in practice civil services are _much_ more efficient in many situations than their market alternatives (possibly because they pretty much epitomise the proletariat you mentioned).

<comment><USER7> I haven't shared your experience with efficient civil service. In the US, everything without market pressure fills with bloat.

<comment><USER6> In terms of _customer interaction_ it's obviously a terrible experience, even when you do meet helpful people. But have you actually gone through a process where the civil service was more expensive than the market alternative?

By and large, the empirical data does not support the public perception of government (and remember there are many layers of "government") being hugely wasteful, especially when looking at money wasted on administration compared to the market.

[http://www.governmentisgood.com/articles.php?aid=20](http://www.governmentisgood.com/articles.php?aid=20)

Also, the government is under a market pressure of a sort: can I "sell" this budget to the people who have to vote for me as a politician?

EDIT: Of course, I'm not saying that civil service is good by definition - just that when done right there are places where it's a much better solution than a free market one. Also, corruption can be an issue of course - as I understand one of the big reasons Greece is in trouble is because of the corrupt civil service, which caused it to bloat as well.

<comment><USER7> Catholic schools generally get by on less money per puli than public. State run liquor stores are more expensive than private.

Even still, it's hard to be more expensive when your cost of capital is near zero. (Taxpayers foot the bill)

<comment><USER6> > State run liquor stores are more expensive than private.

You mean the liquor stores in countries where liquor is extra heavily taxed in an attempt to curb alcoholism? Yeah, no. In fact, that that is exactly what I mean: you are confusing cost-to-the-consumer with cost-to-run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some of the criticisms are still valid: there's a definite "gossip magazine diet plan" vibe to the book, even if the clean cut from waterfall or iterative process horrors (Rational Unified Process anyone?) was sorely needed.

The criticisms about no metrics supporting the book assertions are valid too (we have more metrics now, though).

That said, a lot of things in this book are now considered good engineering practices, and the methodology guys have come back with a vengeance with the Agile/Scrum/Lean/Whatever waves that filled the blanks left by XP (and ensured a nice revenue stream for pure process consultants).

<comment><USER9> > the clean cut from waterfall

...was in fact a strawman. The whole horrible waterfall process was an urban legend: [http://postagilist.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/the-perennial- wa...](http://postagilist.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/the-perennial-waterfall- strawmanmyth/)

<comment><USER10> > The whole horrible waterfall process was an urban legend

Bullshit.

Source: I lived through it in the early and mid 1990s.

<comment><USER11> I'm living through it RIGHT NOW. I'll give you one guess who pushed it on us. And I'll even give you a hint: it almost rhymes with "rubbermint".

<comment><USER10> Waterfall is only mostly dead. I'm told that the reason why the public sector prefers price-and-scope-up-front is that the alternative of "we'll keep delivering things as long as you keep paying us" sounds to them far too much like ways that they have been ripped off badly in the past when buying tanks, bridges, etc.

However there is hope. www.gov.uk is a notable recent success story. [https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/agile](https://www.gov.uk/service- manual/agile)

The difference is that in the early 1990s, most of us thought that larger software projects were just _like that_. We didn't know any better.

<comment><USER12> That is absolutely the reason. On top of that, the only reason they want to use iterations (along with the dreaded inchstone) is so they can use Microsoft Project as a progress bar. If you try to change your iteration deliverables (that were set three years ago) because of actual project issues, you get a ration of shit from the government and their advisors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> my favorite one so far. from my POV today, if I didn't know this was a one- star review I might mistake it for a positive review :-) (except maybe for the obvious "worst practices" comment at the end)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

This book advocates extreme coding. It's a disguised way to legitimize "dive- into-coding" with no proper analysis and design. This author advocates little if any comments, documentation etc. He actually states that "design is in the code" and documents get out of date and that's an excuse not to do it. How is that in comparison to the "traceability" principle advocated so strongly by Jacobson and Rumbaugh who believe that the final code should be traced back to the analysis documents (use cases in Jacobson book) He advocates programming in pair instead of code reviews! In short, this book gathers the industry "worst practices" exactly the opposite of OMT, OOSE, RUP etc.

<comment><USER14> > This author advocates little if any comments, documentation etc.

I'm very much of the opinion that good code self documents, and excessive use of comments and documentation is a crutch for bad code.

Some optimised code might be really incomprehensible without commnets, but its the exception rather than the case. By far my biggest use of comments is to highlight inadequate or rushed code that should be revisited later (i.e. TODO: or HACK: rather than NOTE:).

Don't get me wrong - design and documentation is useful in practice as well as being the 'theoretical ideal' that I think should be striven towards. Diving in and making a mess to fix stuff or diverging from an original design is bad in theory - in practice it is a necessary evil with tight deadlines or when rescuing a project that is already in a seriously bad state - or even when the original design was naive or even impossible because it came from an inexperienced or otherwise inadequate source.

<comment><USER15> >>I'm very much of the opinion that good code self documents, and excessive use of comments and documentation is a crutch for bad code.

I'm very much of the opinion that you are very much of the wrong opinion.

"Good code self-documents" is a myth. Most programmers have trouble coming back and reading _their own code_ , much less other programmers' codes. Comments and documentation written in spoken language ensure that the code can be understood much more quickly and efficiently and any misunderstandings are prevented.

<comment><USER16> The fatal problem with the notion that the code is the documentation is the fact that the code only tells you what the code _does_ , as opposed to what it's _designed_ to do. How do you know a behavior you observe by reading the code isn't a bug which is going to be fixed next week? Or an arbitrary implementation detail that isn't guaranteed? That is what docs and interfaces and specs are for. "The code is the documentation" only works if the code is immutable.

<comment><USER17> Nonsense. When you read the code you need to know what it does, not what the programmer had intended, then, and only then, will you stand any hope of fixing bugs.

well chosen function and variable names tell you the intention, if it's modular enough then it will all make sense when you read it.

If people could just get over this documentation phase that programming went through in the 80's and 90's due to languages containing obtuse syntax and being so low level you had to hold a dozen things in your head at once (I'm thinking of you COM) - but in this era, with languages that operate at a high level of abstraction the era of documenting the code is over.

"The code is the documentation only works if the code is immutable."

that's actually backwards. If you want to stand any chance of changing the code then it should be readable and well structured, not well documented.

<comment><USER18> I'm skeptical. How do you know what's intended behavior and what isn't if you don't know _why_ the code is structured the way it is? Understanding what it does is necessary but not sufficient. You risk introducing more bugs if you don't understand _why_ the code does what it does.

"well chosen function and variable names tell you the intention, if it's modular enough then it will all make sense when you read it."

The two hardest things in computer science are concurrency and naming things. Oh, and off-by-one errors.

<comment><USER19> If the code doesn't match what's intended, it's most likely because the original implementator misunderstood it, or didn't think of a particular edge case - and thus the comments won't reflect that as well.

You look at code to determine what exactly the system does, but in order to determine what exactly the system _should_ do, you need to look at the users needs or the business process, the code+comments can't tell you that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The comment about pair programming resonated with me: _What Mr. Beck writes about the paired-programming aspect is contrary to common sense and anyone even the slightest inkling of perception into the personality traits of developers._

Pair programming was THE most distasteful, unpleasant thing I have ever done in any employment. And I include in that my very first job which included cleaning grease traps and bathrooms at McDonalds.

<comment><USER21> Gurdjieff said that the path to spiritual development is to like what _it_ does not like.

If developers do not like pair programming, is it a problem with pair programming or is it a problem with developers, specifically their unconscious, machine-like _it_?

The whole point of XP is not only to go against management best practice but also against the comfortable habits of most software developers, in an effort to make them better developers.

<comment><USER22> Pushing against arbitrary comfortable habits is not a way to become better at anything. Some of those habits/inhibitions have very good reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm reading the reviews and I realize that I don't have the background and years of experience to understand the software development world as it was in the year 2000 (I graduated in 2006).

I get some of it, because of war stories. But I know I'm missing a huge piece of it.

Like when did some of the older practices come about? Was it in the 90s? Late 90s? 80s? Are most of the reviewers curmudgeons that that watched the SDLC landscape change before their very eyes as their certifications lost value?

<comment><USER4> If you mean Waterfall, the term was adapted from civil engineering, which of course made a lot of sense for software (sarcasm). One of the earliest papers on the process was in the 70s by William Royce where the term waterfall was used to describe software development at its worst.

<comment><USER24> Like it or not but the waterfall method does make a lot of sense in software development. It may be useless if you're trying to create another billion dollar useless web app, but is very helpful when you have to create software for mission-critical applications.

<comment><USER25> "mission critical"...

<comment><USER26> Yeah. Mission critical. It's not just a buzz word - there exists software that is _critical_ to completion of the _mission_.

Examples: Missile guidance system. Space probe communication subroutine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The reviews complaining about evidence did have a point. At the time, XP was based on experiences at Chrysler implementing the C3 project - which was canned [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChryslerComprehensiveCompensation](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChryslerComprehensiveCompensation)

Though tbh the same could be said of any of the mountains of methodology books we waded through in the 90s. The word 'evidence' appears precisely once in the RUP white paper, and it's not in reference to evidence for RUP itself being effective.

<comment><USER28> Projects can be canned for all sorts of reasons, but from what I recall the people involved in C3 blamed the Chrysler management. Perhaps the latter were more interested in having a working payroll system than inventing the future of software development.

One of the criticisms I remember some people making of XP when it first came to prominence was that it shifted a lot of the hard work of software development onto the customer, or rather the customer representative; certainly, ever since I heard about what happened to the first XP customer representative (see [http://www.coldewey.com/publikationen/conferences/oopsla2001...](http://www.coldewey.com/publikationen/conferences/oopsla2001/agileWorkshop/hendrickson.html)) I've taken comments about XP being a humane methodology with a pinch of salt.

<comment><USER27> I don't disagree with what you say about C3; my comment is more to do with the "see one-write one" nature of software books. Even though some books turn out surprisingly well, there's a distinct lack of depth and statistical analysis in the field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Robert C. Martin (known as "Uncle Bob" to many) wrote a blog post somewhat related to this recently. The gist is that Extreme Programming the name is dead because Extreme Programming the principles have been (mostly) widely adopted. It's a great read and I recommend checking it out.

[http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2013/12/10/Thankyou- Kent....](http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2013/12/10/Thankyou-Kent.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> ... And they were completely right. Who does "extreme programming" nowadays? It was a cult, not a serious software engineering methodology.

<comment><USER31> No. In college, I followed the c2 wiki where XP was crafted, out of the ashes of the Smalltalk-based Chrysler payroll system.

It was a bunch of practitioners sick of being told by MBA-types (or modelling "architects" that couldn't code) of the proper way to write software.

Almost everyone in modern software development has been impacted by XP, if you think through some of the practices that almost no one mainstream had heard of or were discussing in 1999 until XP:

\- Customer is on the team (Often the biggest factor in IT projects)

\- Test driven development (now BDD)

\- Continuous integration (now Continuous delivery and Devops)

\- Design improvement (refactoring)

\- Small releases (now "Lean Startups")

\- Planning game (or estimation without Gantt charts and WBS)

Detractors focus on the controversial practices like pair programming as if they were lunatic. Or on consultants making money flogging a crap methodology. I don't think consultants could make money on XP back in the day - it was too foreign and extreme.

Agile was born off the fumes of XP, to give people methodological freedom while agreeing to the same principles. This unfortunately enabled legions of consultants to invent their own whatever-the-hell method for their client and subject employees to it. But it also helped some teams to deliver faster and higher quality than they would have otherwise.

<comment><USER30> XP - to actually _be_ XP - is no less prescriptive. Either you follow the 12-step program, or you're a heretic. Now small-a agile is certainly a good thing - but like Nietzsche I am suspicious of any attempt to systematize what should be organic.

<comment><USER32> One of the XP rules is "fix XP when it breaks". I dispute that it is prescriptive. Retrospectives provide a mechanism for changing process.

<comment><USER33> For the curious [1]. Which brings up a point that I try to make with colleagues about _any_ method/process. If you apply them blindly you might get lucky, but you'll probably get terrible results. They have to be modified to suit the personalities and capabilities and needs of the team, the company, the industry.

[1] [http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/fixit.html](http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/fixit.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://programming-motherfucker.com/](http://programming-motherfucker.com/)

<comment><USER28> I'd have thought [http://zedshaw.com/essays/c2i2_hypothesis.html](http://zedshaw.com/essays/c2i2_hypothesis.html) would be more relevant here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Hopefully we've evolved to the point where we can reject any dogmatic approach and realize that there exists certain good practices that can be applied - <USER2> it depends on the environment we find ourselves in, size and makeup of available team, timeframe, existing rules we have to adhere to for the particular project etc.. No silver bullet, but we rehash these debates endlessly.

</comment><comment><USER35> Fred Brooks advocated most aspects of extreme programming in 1975 (MM-M).

</comment><comment><USER36> Whenever I see/hear the word "extreme" in the context of anything, it sounds like a cult to me. Obligatory reference [0]

[0] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO2Abp0FbA0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO2Abp0FbA0)

</comment><comment><USER37> And today most people I know who mention it keep saying XP when they mean pair programming. Not as if it's one of many practices in XP, but as if the two were synonymous. Please tell me this isn't common.

<comment><USER31> People latch on to what aspect they don't like of a thing and it becomes synonymous with the thing itself.

With XP, sadly, this is true. Most times you bring up the XP practices individually, and they're "good ideas". You say XP, and they say "fuck pairing!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> What's the problem with pair programming?</comment>


The Nature of Inhabited Planets and Their Inhabitants [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.07804v1.pdf

<comment><USER2> Shouldn't the URL for an arXiv submission point to the abstract rather than the PDF? This lets one read the abstract without downloading the whole document.

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.07804](http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.07804)

<comment><USER3> The abstract page (HTML plus all of the resources it loads) is larger than the full PDF.

<comment><USER2> But the size of both in bits is too small to matter. The real question is how long things take to render, and PDFs are slower.

Also, the abstract page has a clear link to the PDF, but most people don't know the PDF has a clickable link to the abstract page (along the left margin).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This paper basically suggests that any extraterrestrials are likely to be much larger than us, at around 300 kg, which is kind of scary...</comment>


Zuckerberg hires former Clinton pollster - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/02/zuckerberg-hires-former-clinton-pollster-joel-benenson-241265 <comment><USER2> Am I the only one who thinks this speculation on Zuck running for pres is all nonsense? There's been a revolving door between Dem staff and elite tech industry positions since Obama. No one thought Larry Page or Sergey Brin was going into politics then. He's a young person very interested in politics, and has the wherewithal to explore the arena in some unique ways (visiting random blue collar Americans), but there's no indication he's ready to abandon his duties at FB. Or is there?

<comment><USER3> People who are merely exploring the country to learn more about it rarely feel the need to intensively document it using a professional media team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Should've hired from Bernie's team. He was outspent, fighting against the DNC (and the media), operating on grass roots rather than machine politics. He almost won. In fairness, much of the same could be said of Trump. Hillary's team lost in spite of massive inorganic advantages.

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems like he might really be going for 2020. This might be even more interesting than 2016 was.

<comment><USER6> If he does run, I can't even imagine the type of data he has access to. What a massive advantage.

<comment><USER7> I don't think he can just use Facebook's data. That would be insane.

<comment><USER8> "I promise I won't use it. Pinky promise."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know this is completely off-topic, but what's up with the comments?

To me they seem as kinda unusual for HN, more reddit-like. Among all the threads I have looked at in the last few hours, this is the only one where it is so extreme.

<comment><USER10> In all fairness the idea of Zuckerberg running for president is a little extreme (even if true) and is likely to be the subject of ridicule and criticism.

<comment><USER9> I understand that, bu usually HN refrains from commenting repetitive one- liners.

The main reason I come to HN instead of just living on reddit is that the chance that the comments refer to content in the article and not just the sentiment of the headline is much greater.

Also, comments are somewhat unique. The trouble with reddit comments is that they are completely overrun with extremely predictable memes or express some sort of emotion (usually outrage or hype) without adding _anything_.

I really fear that HN turns into a subreddit, because I have no idea what site I would go to next.

<comment><USER11> "HN is turning into reddit now, it used to be different" is perhaps the most repetitive comment on all of HN, though. People have been making this complaint for years and years now. It's so common that in fact there's a rule against it in the HN rules, [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

 _If your account is less than a year old, please don 't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a common semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills._

(And that rule itself was written at least 5 years ago.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> /gif its happening

</comment><comment><USER13> God damn it. Now all the billionaires are lining up for a run, this is our new dystopia. Trump's election is like the moment in Rome when Caesar crowned himself emperor, the empire went downhill from there. We need to re-establish the old societal norm of hating rich people or all we're going to get are celebrity billionaires from now on. Rich people are inherently bad and evil. They got to where they are by destroying many people along the way. All our efforts as a society must be directed at limiting their power or our democratic experiment is over. Bring back the guillotines!

<comment><USER14> Such a bunch of bullshit. Plenty of people are rich because they are doctors, surgeons, entrepreneurs who provided a service and created jobs.

<comment><USER11> Nobody has ever made a billion dollars simply by being a doctor or surgeon. In medicine, it's the pharma investors who make that kind of money, not the people who actually work in hospitals.

<comment><USER9> And why would the pharma investors be bad people?

<comment><USER15> Especially since "pharma investors" includes people like the pension fund manager who tries to make sure your grandmother keeps getting her retirement check every month.

It's easy to gin up hatred against some mythical Scrooge McDuck character swimming in a money bin. Not so easy when it's that kindly old lady who lives across the street.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Zuckerberg 2020

Trust Me, Dumb Fucks

<comment><USER17> Seriously this right here. This reason alone he will never get my vote.

His argument would have to be that he is reformed.

I'd rather vote for someone who doesn't have to come back from that - especially since it's the reason he's made billions.

<comment><USER18> >This reason alone he will never get my vote.

Would you like people to hold an off-the-cuff comment made at the age of 20 against you for the rest of your days?

I've many issues with FB, Zuckerberg and the rest of the cohort, but a comment made 13 years ago isn't one of them.

<comment><USER17> We trusted him with our data, and he's spent the last 12 years selling it, making billions, and manipulating news/views/free speech to fit his agenda.

How is this an off-the-cuff comment? It is his mantra. Are we somehow not dumb-fucks for still giving him our data? Again - he's made billions because of that comment alone.

He will never, ever, ever, get my vote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hiring a member of the losing team, especially one whose polling was obviously very bad (they didn't come close to accurately predicting Clinton's popularity or lack thereof), doesn't seem like the path to victory.

<comment><USER20> to be fair she won the popular by 3m, they just happened to be inefficient votes.

<comment><USER19> Which polling should have been able to reflect, and allow her to better target some of the voters she lost.

She skipped out on campaigning in several states that flipped for Trump, and didn't really do much to address her (un)likeability.

Edit - the US election is won or lost on electoral votes, not the popular vote. You play to win within the rules, not to make excuses.

<comment><USER21> Clinton's campaigning problems were cobsistent, IIRC, across all of her elections; she consistently lost ground, she just had less of it to lose in her Presidential run. (This is true not only of here Senate and Presidential general election campaigns, but also both Presidential primaries.)

It seems likely to me that it wasn't her pollsters from all those elections that were the weakness, but the candidate, who has a strong loyal base within the party, limited ability to hold on to votes that initially lean her way that aren't part of that base, and basically no ability (in part because of hardened negative opinions on a large segment of the electorate) to swing opposed or uncommitted voters.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Which Apps are threatened by iOS 5 - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/which-apps-are-threatened-by-apples-upgrades/

<comment><USER2> Marco had _two_ arguments on Build & Analyze for why he wasn't overly concerned with Reading List.

First, he didn't expect RL to have defer-reading, readability, _and_ sync. But, like everyone's saying, it does. Shit.

Second, the defer-reading market is theoretically _huge_. It's something everyone needs to do. A tiny percentage captured off that market is worth millions of dollars.

iP is currently the best synced defer-reading app around and probably will remain so even after Reading List is released.

But more importantly, how hard is it to come up with 2-3 killer features to further differentiate iP from Reading List for the tiny fraction of the market required to be successful?

I'm sure it's dismaying to see what he expected to be an afterthought feature showcased in the keynote, but I'm still with him on the dynamics of this market. Reading List is not going to be the final word in deferred reading.

For whatever it's worth, Marco is the one I feel bad for here. Most of these other applications were so clearly implicated by Apple's roadmap that it's hard for me to get too worked up about it. How do you not cheer for Apple taking steps to replace SMS?

<comment><USER3> The biggest problem for Marco is that adding articles to Instapaper on your iOS devices is difficult. Adding a bookmarklet on iOS takes 3 or more steps that were difficult even for a grizzled nerd like me. Reading List has absolutely no such friction on any Apple platform.

<comment><USER4> I've never needed to add an article to Instapaper from my iOS device, but that's just me. I use Instapaper to sync things I want to read from my laptop to my multiple devices. At least in the near term, I doubt Reading List will do the things I want to do as well as Instapaper.

I wouldn't expect Reading List to take many Instapaper users away, and I think it will drive not-insignificant numbers from Reading List to Instapaper as people want an upgrade. Net gain for Instapaper, hopefully.

<comment><USER2> I'm the same way. The value prop of Instapaper for me is, "allows me not to read things I would otherwise feel compelled to waste time reading, while at my computer".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have no great love for Apple, but the rhetoric around this is simply ridiculous. When a great app comes out, tech sites will say things like "why isn't this a feature of the OS?", but then when they become a feature then the OS vendor gets criticized for "stabbing" app developers.

<comment><USER6> For starters, Apple is known for taking an idea that has many 3rd party solutions, incorporating it into the OS, then presenting it as their own whizz-bang idea. (See Spotlight vs Butler/QuickSilver/LaunchBar)

<comment><USER7> nathanb: why is Apple being criticized for doing X?

pyre: Apple is doing X.

Your comment doesn't really address the question, which is, "Why criticize Apple for not implementing it, then criticize them later for implementing it like you asked them to?"

<comment><USER6> It does. It has less to do with Apple implementing it or not, and more to do with Apple's lack of acknowledgement of where their inspiration came from. At least in my mind.

It's sort of like the difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism.

<comment><USER8> Or the mindset where NBC will bother dedicating time in their nightly news to cover iCloud (stop looking at me that way, yes some people still watch the nightly news) and voila, the general public thinks apple invented the idea of the cloud. Great for Apple, annoying for us that think Jobs doesn't walk on water.

<comment><USER9> Is this like when that band you liked suddenly got popular so you didn't like them anymore?

Or is it more like when Roman from Party Down met that girl who was "really into Sci Fi" and she started talking about Lord of the Rings and then he berated her with the difference between Fantasy and Sci Fi?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looks almost as if they use the existence of startups as a guide for what products to build. Which is not that bad an idea tactically, considering that a successful startup is usually a sign of something that was missing in the world. But it could start to alienate hackers.

<comment><USER11> When twitter announced changes in their policies, you had said you will be concern about startups which are building on it.

Will you say you are now more concerned about startups (YC or not) which are building innovative apps for iOS?

<comment><USER10> This case seems different. The startups they're threatening aren't ones building stuff on IOS specifically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> True of anything anywhere. Apple is not only your platform, but your competition.

Utility apps for Windows have been getting squashed by new versions of Windows for years and years.

\- I used to run tools to move items around in my Task Bar. Now I can just do that in Windows 7.

\- Or add-ons that told you the resolution of a photo without having to open it. Now you just roll your mouse over it.

\- Red-Eye elimination and other basic photo functions showed up in Vista.

It's the way of the world. If you are a utility, you may become standard issue.

<comment><USER13> with such windows apps, you don't need to worry about Microsoft removing you from the only approved sales conduit.

<comment><USER7> No evidence whatsoever that Apple is going to do this with the affected app developers. And it seems like a pretty unlikely move.

<comment><USER13> why, they have removed apps for "duplicating iOS functionality" before.

<comment><USER14> Have they removed any, or simply not approved them in the first place? (Honest question.)

It would be pretty unexpected for them to be retroactively banned.

<comment><USER15> Apple removed Camera+ after it was in the app store. They removed them since they found a way to use the volume button as a shutter. Welcome iOS5.

[http://www.iphonehacks.com/2010/08/apple-removes-camera- ipho...](http://www.iphonehacks.com/2010/08/apple-removes-camera-iphone-app- from-the-app-store-after-developer-reveals-hack-to-enable-hidden-feature.html)

The reason Apple gives is priceless:

 _Your application cannot be added to the App Store because it uses iPhone volume buttons in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion._

Of course, now it's standard. Say cheese.

<comment><USER7> That removal was not for duplicating existing functionality, as you correctly point out. So it's not really germane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If your app is useful and you don't have a patent don't be surprised if Apple copies it instead of buying you out.

Moral: Get a patent or get out of Apple's way.

EDIT: To the guys below that say patents don't matter because you can't beat Apple's deep pockets and patent portfolio in court: The patent does matter because after Apple buys you it can beat Google and Microsoft with it in court. Conversely, it doesn't want Google buying you doing the same.

<comment><USER17> Or better yet, rather than complaining that your market niche didn't exist, unchanged, in perpetuity, embrace competition and work to differentiate your product and make it better than Apple's offering.

<comment><USER18> Completely! People still believe in developing new things and not just trying to patent the market into a corner - right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A lot of these arguments just don't seem very well thought out.

Apple's todo-list is going to kill Remember The Milk? Maybe, but there are hundreds of todo-list apps in the store already, all with subtly different semantics and presentation, none of which appears to have achieved dominance and killed all the others, even though many are free. Why should Apple's fare any differently?

And it's like that in every category. People predicted that Time Machine would kill SuperDuper. Well, it turns out that Time Machine is totally not a replacement for SuperDuper, and SuperDuper is very much alive, thank god. And Time Machine thrives as well, which is good, because the tools have different audiences and purposes.

Seems like any article like this one should include a link to that classic article about the guy who had a Starbucks open up next to his indie coffeeshop, and then a year later started looking around for locations near other Starbucks stores to open coffeeshops in. It would be a useful disclaimer, because sometimes the big player co-opts your niche, but sometimes it justs makes your niche more mainstream.

<comment><USER20> >Why should Apple's fare any differently?

Because it's bundled with the OS and will sit on the homescreen of every iOS device going forward?

Because, when my wife asked me to research a good to-do list for her the other day, it was because "Milk Sugar Eggs" wasn't on her phone's homescreen?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Instead of building those seperate solutions i really think Apple should build some general IPC/sharing model into the OS (like the intent system on android). It would enable so much more integration and open up all applications, i'd love that. I really miss that on my iPad, being able to just send the content i am viewing to random app/page X (articles to read it later, for example). Why rebuild read it later?

I guess the only reason is that this would open up the platform a bit more, this would be a horrible scenario: At breakfast i could read the web on my iPad, send interesting articles to "read it later", read those on my android in the train to work and the rest at work on my linux laptop..

</comment><comment><USER22> The flip side of this is: "What apps are enabled by iOS 5?"

<comment><USER23> Just get them into the App Store quick before Apple adds them to iOS 5.x or 6.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It seems the author is missing the forest for the trees. It's not iOS 5 itself that is threatening apps, and not just apps. It's the entire Apple ecosystem which includes iOS 5, OS X Lion and iCloud versus everything else. With iCloud being free, and with iOS 5 being deeply integrated with Twitter, Apple is giving Google and FB the finger. No more indexable data through web crawlers.

</comment><comment><USER25> It seems for most of these, the best way to compete will be to go multi- platform. That is something Apple won't be doing anytime soon.

 _Want a chat app that you can also use to talk to your Android-using friends?_ etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> From the comments of the post:

> Hmmm, let's see, I paid my way to WWDC 2011 with my revenue from google ads > on my website content - which are removed when using The Read feature in > Safari. That content can also be mailed in full with no ads and no > attributive link to friends.

This is actually also an interesting point. Could it be a sneaky way from Apple to push publishers to go Newsstand as their online ads are not working any longer?

</comment><comment><USER26> Given the limitations of iCloud (only backs up purchased music, only syncs productivity docs created in iWork, etc.) I really can't see it killing my love of Dropbox.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't know if Boxcar is all that threatened. The notification wrangling it seemed to do seemed like an after-thought, so no doubt the new notifications will be better.

However, I use it and it has always seemed to me that its focus has been to create push notifications for services that otherwise wouldn't have them, such as email, twitter (before the official app added push), and others (they have an API).

</comment><comment><USER28> "Apple clearly values their developers. They are a source of innovation and development. The company was proud to announce during the keynote that it had paid out more than $2.5 billion to developers."

Wait, what? They value developers by taking $1 billion of their revenue, and then eating their lunch?

</comment><comment><USER29> I would worry more about the spotlight this brings on the functionality itself. The mainstreaming of deferred reading without ads is likely to inspire some kind of backlash from the content creators.

</comment><comment><USER30> Most of these are moot for me because my laptop is a Mac and my desktop is Windows 7.

Chrome with sync set up, plus Dropbox, and I've covered basically everything on the list.

<comment><USER31> iOS is a mobile operating system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's not like this is new. Apple did the same in OS X. For instance, Spotlight replaced existing search software.

<comment><USER33> There's a little bit of a difference here in that Apple has set a precedent of removing applications in competition with features provided by the OS itself.

<comment><USER17> What apps has Apple ever removed because of a feature added to iOS after the app was originally approved for sale in the market?

I can't think of any examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> So what refinements could Apple make, or what features could they add, without stepping on someone's toes?

</comment><comment><USER35> Apple just pulled a Twitter!

</comment><comment><USER36> It's a natural progression. Applications that add useful features to a platform get assimilated in the platform. The only news is it's happening rather more quickly than in the past. Apple is looking quite nimble.

</comment><comment><USER37> Add another one to the list. Now that the native email client can sign and en/decrypt emails, there's no need for the enterprise email reader from Good <http://www.good.com/iphone/></comment>


Bitcoin $645? Yeah, That's Totally Reasonable - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/18/bitcoin-645-yeah-thats-totally-reasonable/

<comment><USER2> How about 870CAD right now according to btc china (biggest exchange out there) and google's rates?</comment>


"It's Time for Online Voting" (blockchains) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/opinion/online-blockchain-voting.html <comment><USER2> Physical paper voting wins no matter what.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI)</comment>


Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay hit with penalty for not allowing public beach access - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/13/ritz-carlton-half-moon-bay-faces-1-6-million-penalty-for-failing-to-provide-public-beach-access/ <comment><USER2> A hotel that charges $1,000 per night with 261 rooms is charged $1,600,000 for multiple years worth of violations.

If I understand the math correctly, this hotel, when fully booked, would make that much in revenue in _a week_.

I'm continually reminded why many companies have employees who choose to do unethical things: they'll make more money than the fine will ever amount to.

<comment><USER3> I get providing an easement, but requiring not just a parking lot, but to build it is a shakedown.

<comment><USER4> Definitely not. They agreed to it during the permitting phase. Companies are often required to build public access 'stuff' regularly - nothing different here, really.

<comment><USER3> Withholding a permit until the property owner does something not explicitly required by law is exactly the shakedown I'm speaking of.

<comment><USER5> Just because you own property doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want with it. The Ritz knew there would be conditions, and they chose to agree. They could have sold the property and built a hotel elsewhere if they didn't like the conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good deal. Public access is a continual fight.

</comment><comment><USER7> "...they face an intimidating array of hotel staff members, wealthy golfers, fences, guard stations and gates."

Wealthy golfers are intimidating? And how can you tell the wealthy golfers from the not-so-wealthy golfers? Ritz Carlton staff members are actually very friendly. Prison fences may be intimidating, but not so much these fences.

Guard station, agreed. But there is one. Not plural.

I've stayed there a couple of times for company-paid conferences. There are 'beach access' signs, but I agree it's not clear that the public can use the parking garage to access the beach.

I just find it laughable that the writer uses 'wealthy golfers' as a source of intimidation. Perhaps the public finds wealthy people intimidating in general. Is that true?

<comment><USER8> Honestly I've thought about going to use the beach there once, but I really just didn't want to deal with the hassle of people not knowing that I was allowed. It probably would have been nothing, but just having that in the back of my mind kept me from going. And I actually have the Ritz Carlton credit card and stay in their hotels with some frequency!

It's dumb, but the thought is probably there in a lot of people's minds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is the additional 27-acre space they're using the funds to purchase the Wavecrest Open Space that was acquired in 2017[1], or additional open space?

[1] [https://www.hmbreview.com/news/nonprofits-acquire-acres- in-h...](https://www.hmbreview.com/news/nonprofits-acquire-acres-in-half-moon- bay/article_2f43791a-e049-11e7-905a-3fc59915925f.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> The California Coastal Commission is like the IRS out here in California. Maybe one of the best run planning bodies in the country.

They will find out if you're not abiding by the law.</comment>


The frontpage with a threshold of 100 points - <AUTHOR> http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100 <comment><USER2> Not that this type of experiment is bad, but why is the UI so completely neglected? Is this a matter of thinking it's not important, because it's not fun work, or because it can all be customized with grease monkeys? Or what?

I think the quality of stories on HN is pretty good. What I'd much prefer to see any amount of attention given to is things like:

1) Let me take back a vote. Particularly on mobile, I misclick those tiny arrows a lot.

2) Let me comment inline. Having other comments, besides the parent around for examination while commenting would probably help overall comment quality.

3) Fix the mobile interface. It's impossible to use HN on mobile iPhone and Android handhelds. Making a slightly modified styled sheet with JavaScript is trivial.

4) Support someone making an app, or commission one. As far as I can tell, the current HN apps are all kind of buggy and have little updating. There are lots of young neophytes who'd love to work on this, particularly if sanctioned, and a funded effort would lead to a better product.

These basic UI improvements don't even seem to be on the radar. Also, I'll add, the story-killing on this site is pretty heavy-handed, yet capricious. Same with the title-editing. What constitutes a "hacker-centric" story changes with the mood of the moderators, and the tendency to just change each title to the original headline is misguided. I also think that the special privileges given to YC companies corrupts the whole system.

If there were any other community like this, people would be driven away by the neglected UI and the Star Chamber that governs the content. But there isn't, so there's no pressure to do anything but midnight HN science experiments. I should just pray for some competition I guess...

<comment><AUTHOR> _why is the UI so completely neglected?_

Because when I spend time on HN my top priority is features that will make the content better. I believe that matches the priorities of the users-- that users would rather use a site with good stories and comments and a primitive UI than one with a slick UI and worse stories and comments. And time is a zero-sum game. Spending more time on UI = spending less on quality.

The focus on content quality above all is the reason you find yourself saying later "If there were any other community like this..."

You're simply wrong about the moderation. Nearly every story that gets killed is either autokilled, or a dup, or flagged to death by users. I would guess moderators manually kill less than 10 non-dup stories a day. You're also wrong that YC cos get special privileges.

<comment><USER2> 1) I could accept I'm wrong about stories being killed by humans, but I know the titles get edited by humans. I remember one story I posted about some really ancient, accurate maps, and I made the title something like "Accurate maps from the 1500s unearthed." And then some moderator made it the story headline instead "Named building in DC hosts map show" or something equally uninformative.

2) I'm positive YC companies get at least one special privilege - the ability to post jobs.

3) I've been told YC accounts are excluded from anti-spam measures, but I can't prove it.

EDIT: Also, regarding the zero-sum-game argument. All of us developers know we have limited time to spend on things. But a HUGE change to a non-priority that takes almost no time (for example improving the CSS on mobile) should be squeezed in between these experiments that may or may not make the content better, and take hours.

<comment><USER3> I like the UI. I know it's hard for some to believe, but it's stark and functional and fast and mostly stays out of the way; it works. The comment scores need to be hidden for comments you didn't write; other than that, what's to improve? Taking back votes? How about, just forget about the vote.

If HN has a problem with titles, it's with _not enough_ stores having their titles rewritten to the article original.

<comment><USER4> _The comment scores need to be hidden for comments you didn't write_

People keep saying this, but it would severely limit the utility of the site. When I chance upon a post with more than ~50 comments, I only want to read the 6-7 or so that the community has agreed are best. I perceive a positive correlation between comment scores and quality. That is, the odds that a post with 50 points contains good content do empirically seem to be higher than for posts with 2 points.

In short: I need a comment filter that is more strict than than simply "appears on Hacker News". I don't want to read every single one.

<comment><USER3> Comments are sorted based in part on votes. That's fine. The system we have now isn't picking out the best comments; it's picking out my comments.

<comment><USER5> I like using votes to determine whether or not it's worth devling into a deep thread. If there's a conversation that goes 5 levels deep, you can just scan the bottom layers - if they're getting votes, then it's likely to be a worthwhile conversation.

Similarly, if there's a bunch of responses with a score of 1 with replies forking off all over the place, having a visible score lets you catch that at- a-glance and avoid bothering with a conversation that is clearly digressing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Any chance of a ranged version, like "over 5, but under 200"? For some reason, while upvoted stories are mostly good, the _most_ upvoted stories less often interest me, since they seem to be disproportionately about politics, business, self-help/motivation, or some sort of drama. This list is almost a perfect list of stories I'd like to filter out: <http://news.ycombinator.com/best> (ok, there's some good stuff in there too, but it's not bad as a heuristic).

<comment><USER7> plus stuff with 500 points stays on the list longer, can get too stale

<comment><USER8> No, articles get deprecated quite soon anyway. Try substituting 100 for 500 in the URL: you only get 1 article currently.

<comment><USER7> You're wrong and that test is misleading.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=200>

I'm seeing 380 points, 11 days old is ahead of 205 points and 4 days old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While this is a really, really tempting front page, won't this just encourage groupthink? HN doesn't suffer from this as much it might, but it has its share. In addition, interesting stories languish unnoticed on /newest all the time, and if enough people switch to an >100 front page, articles with just 5-10 points have an even smaller chance of being noticed.

pg, I'm sure you considered this problem; could you talk a bit about your thinking behind this filter?

<comment><AUTHOR> _could you talk a bit about your thinking behind this filter?_

"A lot of people have asked for it. It would be easy to write. Let's try it and see what happens."

<comment><USER10> Do you have some sort of pre-existing test for whether or not a feature is good at the time you implement it. Some way of knowing if it's good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This has probably been suggested before, but can we just get rid of the points display (story, comment, & user) altogether? The automated sorting on this data has always been enough for me, and I can't think of a reason why any of us needs to know the exact point total of any of these things (except maybe karma).

I suppose there are some out there that would like to know an individual user's karma as a quick indicator of worthiness for X. Aside from this I'd be thrilled to see the number games and measuring sticks go away.

<comment><USER12> This doesn't really work, because things with high points can be anywhere on the page after they've stopped getting votes -- if you look at the front page, the stories aren't in point order by any means.

Although this would be bad for the community (people need to see the low-point articles for them to get voted on), you could have a page that sorts all stories by number of points, and allows you to remove them either by clicking on them, or marking them as uninteresting. It would solve the 'problem' of missing articles when I'm away at least.

I guess you could have some kind of mix of new and highly voted articles, which could be interesting?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Of course, if many people used that threshold, almost no story would ever reach 100 points in the first place.

<comment><USER14> This, to me, seems to be the dilemma. The more features like this there are, filtering the input so we only see the "good stuff", the fewer eyes there are on the new submissions, and so the greater the chance that really some excellent submissions will never be seen.

More and more we're suggesting that people look at the "newest" page instead of just the "news" page to try to make sure that good submissions get their chance, and bad submissions get flagged, and yet here's another facility to take people away from the "newest" page.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is a great facility, and I'm pretty sure I'll be using it on occasion, but I'll also hang out on the "newest" page, because that's where the genuinely interesting stuff appears, often getting no upvotes, because it was never seen.

<comment><USER15> Maybe "front-page-with-100-points" is the sort of place newbies should be encouraged to check, and mainly more established users should be encouraged to check "newest".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Doesn't seem precise...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=489> (489) doesn't see a thread with 490 points, but <http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=484> (484) does. Caching? Rounding? Thread in question: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1990498>

Still, awesome, many thanks! Especially because it drags up a bunch of good- but-older entries that I may have missed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, that was a bug; fixed.

<comment><USER17> See, static typing won't help you there!

<comment><USER16> I totally got a "where is your god now?!"[1] vibe from this.

[1]: [http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/11/24/where-is-your- dog-n...](http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/11/24/where-is-your-dog-now/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd like an option alongside noprocrast and showdead:

* hidekarma

For your view only, it hides the karma in the top right, and hides the number of points next to each article and comment.

I, personally, find karma to be a distraction...I'm not afraid to admit that I subconsciously check my karma score every time I log in, and _very_ occasionally catch myself "karma whoring"...that is, writing comments or submitting articles in a way that will improve my karma, instead of concentrating on writing something intelligent (yes, they should be the same, but they're not).

</comment><comment><USER17> <http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=9000>

<comment><AUTHOR> Getting no results from over doesn't mean there haven't been any items with that many points (though in fact there haven't been any with 9000 points). Over doesn't pull stuff off disk. It just applies a stricter filter to the pool of recent stories from which the frontpage is generated.

<comment><USER19> I assume swah wasn't expecting any results, it is most likely a reference to <http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-over-9000> .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Twitter feed with a threshold of 100 points: <http://twitter.com/newsyc100>

<comment><USER21> Twitter feed is nice, but the RSS feed is a lot more useful IMO ( <http://feeds.feedburner.com/newsyc100> ).

When I first saw your post ( [http://jeffmiller.github.com/2010/07/23/a-cure- for-hacker-ne...](http://jeffmiller.github.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker- news-overload) ), I missed the RSS feed links, and started looking for ways to convert a twitter feed to an RSS feed (I use Google Reader)... But then I saw the light :)

By the way, thanks a lot for making this, Jeff. I've been using your feeds almost daily since August. I used to spend a lot of time scanning the /best page for unread articles. No more!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is it just me, or have the front page point totals exploded in the last few months?

pg — care to share any traffic data?

<comment><USER23> I've also noticed this. Seemed to be between September-November to me. Links fly off of the first page of /new a lot quicker than before and I've seen a lot of good ones get no further than 2 or 3 points - it's a crapshoot when you submit something now. I've also had a lot more people contact me with "check out this post" type stuff.

<comment><USER24> One of the purposes of Previous Look is to capture the fast changing content of a webpage like /new so that past content can be reviewed quickly. For now <http://www.previouslook.com/hnews/new> has an 15-minute interval snapshot window, which seems to be enough to not miss anything.

<comment><USER23> I like it, though I might stick to the version I developed two months ago - <http://hackerslide.com/> \- as I prefer HN's natural colors ;-)

<comment><USER24> That looks cool! Good work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This would be a great addition to the nav. I can imagine having 3 modes of viewing submissions: "top" (the current default), "new", and "popular" (for >100 votes). I already switch back and forth between the default (or "top") view and the "new" view. This allows me to get a good mix of seeing what the HN algorithm thinks is interesting, as well as what interesting stuff the community is discovering out there on the web. I can see this being well augmented by a third view that presents what's popular to the HN community.

Of course, adding another nav element gets tricky. How many nav links do you need before you start culling or redesigning? FWIW, it seems that grouping nav into 2 sections might be useful. One section would be focused on sorting the stream (top, new, popular). The other section would be focused on filtering the stream (threads, comments, ask, jobs). "Submit" is more of an action than a filter or sort, and might be better positioned as a control outside of the nav.

</comment><comment><USER26> It just occurred to me that while I vote up great comments, I don't remember the last time I gave an up-vote to a thread. Am I atypical?

<comment><USER27> I doubt it. I think most of us are deliberately conservative to offset the lack of downvotes.

<comment><USER28> Isn't that the opposite to what you should do? If you are interested in curbing 'bad' stories you should probably vote for more stories, effectively 'downvoting' what you don't vote for.

<comment><USER29> Not if you think that a lot of crap gets voted up and truly good stories are few and far between.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can we get filters like this for the official RSS feed?

<comment><USER31> I agree, this would be very powerful coupled with something like feedmyinbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Twitter and RSS feeds for HN stories over 20, 50, 100 and 150 points:

[http://jeffmiller.github.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker- ne...](http://jeffmiller.github.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news- overload)

EDIT: Why the downvotes?

</comment><comment><USER33> I think this is great as an option where we can fill in our own threshold. It's another way to play with the feed. I prefer the "newest" setting myself. It's incredibly quick to scan the headlines to see what I'm in the mood for that day. Or I can search with "news.ycombinator.com: searchterm" if I'm looking some particular subject matter. But sometimes it's fun to visit the lists too. news.ycombinator.com/lists Perhaps a couple of those options should go on the top menu.

Maybe the top menu should be Hacker News new 100+ searchterm best active bestcomments etc.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm seeing duplicate entries, for example on:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=250>

The last 4 entries are duplicated.

<comment><USER34> Curiously I see an example of duplicates with slightly different points. Maybe something is not enclosed properly in a transaction and the list is being generated partly before and partly after an update has been applied.

On the 100 points version I see:

27\. The only script in your head (headjs.com) 248 points by timf 12 days ago | comments

28\. The only script in your head (headjs.com) 247 points by timf 12 days ago | comments

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Upvoted just 'cause it was at 99 points. [Added: I think the temptation to do this shows a (minor and obvious) misincentive, like we used to see on IRC when I published weekly stats on the chat in #C.]

</comment><comment><USER36> Great, as I was JUST thinking of making a chrome extension to filter posts with 100+ points.

<comment><USER16> I've been thinking along those lines as well, but it's kinda hairy to do so... you'd have to load a few (or many, depending on the limit) pages, and inject their results into the viewed-page.

Seems like more bandwidth than it's worth. This is (obviously) a better solution though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Even better I changed it to 200 points and found some great gems I had missed.

</comment><comment><USER38> Good but if everyone starts to filter by 100+ then how will good new submissions make it to the top? We need people looking at new submissions and upvoting good ones all the time!

</comment><comment><USER39> Is there any link to this new feature instead of manually typing this or saving this to a bookmark (or any other ways besides a proper hyper-link)?

</comment><comment><USER40> Just a thought that occurred to me. Why does there have to be 2 levels (new and frontpage)? Why not 3 levels. New, Frontpage, "Best" or something.

<comment><USER41> Something like this - <http://news.ycombinator.com/best> ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> the choice of 100pts is pretty good though it's spread over 2 pages. I tried a quick graph hack to visualise, _"Number of points required to fill 1 page of stories (30)?"_ ~ <http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/5256341554/>

</comment><comment><USER43> I'd prefer under?points=x

The very highly upvoted articles seem more likely to be trendy and/or sensational.

</comment><comment><USER44> the tablet article by pg twice is listed twice here. bug? <http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=300>

</comment><comment><USER45> any chance with making it dynamic? I tried changing the number from 100 to 10 and it didn't work. Went back to 100.

</comment><comment><USER46> Wow, looks a lot more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER47> This post itself has almost 100 points. Soon it will be on the 100-point threshold page!</comment>


Square Incident Summary: 2017–03–16 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/square-corner-blog/incident-summary-2017-03-16-2f65be39297 <comment><AUTHOR> This is in response to the Square outage previously discussed here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13887400](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13887400)</comment>


Ask HN: What videoconferencing solution do you recommend? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for a solution to bring 5 conference rooms all together to do meetings and training. I'm looking for something not too expensive and easy to set up. I've found Zoom.us but I am wondering what else is around. <comment><USER2> Zoom</comment>


Never outsource your core - <AUTHOR> http://versiononeventures.com/never-ever-outsource-your-core/

<comment><USER2> Depends what's meant by "core".

If you're a cake business, don't outsource cake making, but do get someone else to build your shop.

But so many web companies spend time and energy building CMS, db astraction layers, and tonnes and tonnes of infrastructure that is _nothing to do with their business_.

</comment><comment><USER3> The most common problem I see is technical outsourcing, there are a lot of MBA based teams who cannot convince a great technical person to join.

As a result, outsourcing to get the product done becomes a necessity and also easier than going around to find a good technical cofounder. It is also tempting since outsourcing seems cheaper and promises to get the product built.

The product just ends up not being good enough.

As a technical person in the startup industry, this is the #1 reason why I think startups fails.

<comment><USER4> A few years ago I did some pro bono work(not intentionally :-) for a couple of startups with domain experience but no software development experience. They had offshored their work to groups in India. The delivered products were marginally functional and not satisfactory. The had compounded the domain to developer communications problems with remote and cultural issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I tend to agree with this advice, but OXO (maker of well-designed houseware products) is a famous counter-example. Not only do they outsource manufacturing (as nearly every product company does these days), but they also outsource _product design_ , which is absolutely their core competency.

I've never understood how they made that work, but obviously it is a strategy that has worked well for them.

<comment><USER6> Marketing. A lot of their recent stuff is cheap crap, IMHO.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely. They are coasting on a couple of awards they received 10 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We ran into this dilemma last year at Lucidchart when we were debating how to handle SEO, PR, and general marketing. We flirted with outsourcing but eventually hired two full-timers and we haven't looked back. Took a month or two to get them up to speed on the product and best practices but I now glean off of their expertise and having them in-house makes our team stronger.

The only thing we would outsource is very quantifiable deliverables that need no additional maintenance to be valuable. Ie. data entry, template designs, link building.

</comment><comment><USER9> I stopped reading at "outsource ... analytics". In this age of data and data science "analytics" means a lot more than web analytics and some javascript on your web pages. This expertise needs to be part of your organization's DNA.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think analytics was referring more to the tools to capture analytics data, not the process of making sense of that data (which is definitely core!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not sure marketing is core to most startups...

<comment><AUTHOR> I would argue it needs to - marketing starts with thinking about how to communicate your product value to your customers and ends with strategies to keep them happy and around for as long as possible. A great product is the basis but if you don't spend time thinking about how to market your product, your company will most likely not scale

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> heads up - broken link on the inc.com article

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - removed the link.</comment></comment>


The Education of Marc Andreessen (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/1998/15/topstory.htm

<comment><USER2> > 3,200 employees.

This number tells so much about the improvements in developer productivity over the years.

Adjusting for TVM, the same revenue is now supported by far fewer engineers (obviously not all 3,200 employees where engineers). The Netscape engineers were highly skilled, so the change in the number of engineers cannot be explained away by differences in engineering skill/capability.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't really say much about developer productivity. What are you comparing this to? You might also be forgetting the insane number of (many 'enterprise') products Netscape was trying to churn out at the time. See:

[http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html)

The browser alone with all of its extra doodads ran on three radically different platform families (Windows 95/NT, Mac OS, Several proprietary Unixes). And that's just the browser. Throw in running one of the top traffic sites at the time.

The internet advertising market which drives a lot of the revenue at many current similar startups was far smaller and less mature, as well. It's difficult to see how we can draw any sensible conclusion about developer productivity from all this.

<comment><USER4> There should be a "NSFW" equivalent for articles with potentially harmful levels of smug. (I've read a lot of articles by jwz over many years, and he is how he is, but still...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is such a great article! Literally, goes through the highs and lows and gives a lot of context to the tweet storming Marc!

Required reading for any founders. You can see the parallels between him & other founders as they metamorphize from boy wunder (mustang car, late to meetings...) to this:

====

Andreessen's transformation from a smug dreamer to a realistic doer has been closely monitored by others in the industry. Patricia Sueltz, general manager of Java software for IBM, has noticed that Andreessen no longer talks about Netscape going it alone. Instead, he's open to collaboration. ''He's a more pragmatic businessman,'' she says. John Doerr, a venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and an Andreessen mentor, says Andreessen isn't a wild-eyed rebel anymore. ''He has retained his fresh point of view about what's possible,'' says Doerr. ''But now he listens much better. He has grown a lot, and it's not over.''

====

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is before AOL bought Netscape, before Loudcloud/Opsware, before Ning, before A16Z. It's interesting, knowing what came later, to see how he's described. It's a sympathetic profile, but it hints that he might be a one-hit wonder. The last quote is good: "And while it's unlikely that Andreessen will change the world again with another Mosaic-like discovery, Mary Meeker, an analyst at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., says: 'He'll be a great CEO--5 to 10 years from now.'"

</comment><comment><USER6> > Andreessen has acquired more grown-up tastes, too. The chubby 6-foot, 4-inch > lad who dressed in shorts, T-shirts, and sandals in 1994 has shed about 30 > pounds and now fancies Ermenegildo Zegna suits and Robert Talbot shirts. > Greasy hamburgers and milkshakes are out, replaced by grilled sturgeon and > chardonnay. And he has traded in his red Mustang for a more sober white > Mercedes-Benz S600 sedan.

yo pmarca, what prompted this change?

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone have a citation for and/or the full original words of Andreesen's famous and important "poorly debugged set of device drivers" remark? The best I can find is [http://ianmurdock.com/cloud/windows-as-a-poorly-debugged- set...](http://ianmurdock.com/cloud/windows-as-a-poorly-debugged-set-of- device-drivers/) .

<comment><USER5> Apparently he didn't say it:

[http://www.wired.com/2012/04/ff_andreessen/2/](http://www.wired.com/2012/04/ff_andreessen/2/)

====

Anderson: A quote of yours that I've always loved is that Netscape would render Windows "a poorly debugged set of device drivers."

Andreessen: In fairness, you have to give credit for that quote to Bob Metcalfe, the 3Com founder.

Anderson: Oh, it wasn't you? It's always attributed to you.

Andreessen: I used to say it, but it was a retweet on my part. [Laughs.] But yes, the idea we had then, which seems obvious today, was to lift the computing off of each user's device and perform it in the network instead. It's something I think is inherent in the technology—what some thinkers refer to as the "technological imperative." It's as if the technology wants it to happen.

<comment><USER7> Thanks! Come to think of it, I think I've seen Bob Metcalfe say it in a video.</comment></comment></comment>


The rise of personal robots for gaming, communication and healthcare - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_breazeal_the_rise_of_personal_robots.html

<comment><AUTHOR> what do you think will be a robots job in 15yrs from now?

my bet: barbers, healthcare of elderly, ... whats yours?</comment>


Cofounder of Whatsapp tweets "It is time. #deleteFacebook" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/976231995846963201 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633774](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633774)

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me when a youtube founder raged against the mandatory google plus login they added on for no reason.

[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/08/youtube-founder- go...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/08/youtube-founder- google_n_4241492.html)</comment>


PGConf2017 Talks (with Videos) - <AUTHOR> https://www.pgconf.us/conferences/2017/schedule/events <comment><AUTHOR> Tutorials weren't recorded. Video is posted beginning with the first Keynote on 2017-03-29</comment>


Ask HN: Why isn't there a push for able Americans to buy bonds? - <AUTHOR> If federal, state, and municipal governments are concerned about wracking up too much debt while considering relief funds, why aren't able Americans being pushed to buy bonds? <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I follow the question: when you buy a bond, you're lending money to the issuer, increasing its debt.

There's no shortage of buyers for government securities, anyway. In yesterday's auction of 28-day U.S. Treasury bills [1], for example, the bid- to-cover ratio was 2.75, meaning that the total of the bids was 2.75 times the face amount of the securities actually sold, and the highest interest rate the government had to agree to pay, to borrow as much as it wanted in that auction, was only 0.091%.

[1] [https://www.treasurydirect.gov/instit/annceresult/press/prea...](https://www.treasurydirect.gov/instit/annceresult/press/preanre/2020/R_20200521_1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Let's say every American bought $100 of bonds today. That would be $33,000,000,000 or 33 billion dollars of bonds. Next, take a look at the daily volume of bonds traded on the financial markets. There is no need for another drop in the bucket.

</comment><comment><USER4> They are, what do you think the FED is doing when they push interest rates to the foor? They make investors chase risker and risker assets/bonds to get the same interest rates. Rates on junk bonds have been pretty low and risk on government bonds even lower. This bankrupts savers in the long term but nobody cares about them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Because while many people are stupid, they aren't that stupid.

You would have a better chance of making money following r/wallstreetbets, because there's no way you can make any money on those bonds. (To be fair, you could also loose everything in wallstreetbets)</comment>


Boeing slams the Falcon Heavy rocket as "too small" - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04/boeing-slams-the-falcon-heavy-rocket-as-too-small/ <comment><USER2> The first thing that came to mind:

[https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/65246298/you-call- th...](https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/65246298/you-call-that-a-knife- this-is-a-knife.jpg)</comment>


Facebook is making its biggest executive shuffle in company history - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17330226/facebook-reorg-mark-zuckerberg-whatsapp-messenger-ceo-blockchain <comment><AUTHOR> "...while giving other longtime Facebook executives new responsibilities, including a new effort to tackle blockchain technology."

Is this a case of a large company not wanting to miss out on what might be a "big thing" or something else?</comment>